When God says no…

photo credit: kensiekate.com

We dreamed. We prayed. We planned. We prayed some more.

The planning was for an annual women’s training here in Thailand — something, as team leader, I was intimately involved with! Participants had registered from four different countries. The team that would be leading the sessions was gearing up to join us from the US and the Philippines. The venue had been booked since last November and was awaiting our final count once registration closed the end of July.

But… because of the interactive nature of the training and because we didn’t have enough registrants, we had to cancel.

God said no.

Disappointing? Yes. Confusing? Yes.

This wasn’t the first time in my life that God halted plans I have made — nor will it be the last.

I remember how, as newlyweds, we had dreams and hopes and plans about our future… how we would start our family after a couple of years and then have three kids (since we both came from families with three kiddos, that seemed the likely number). That dream took us on a new path when we learned, after being married six years, that we wouldn’t be able to have biological children.

Disappointing? Yes. Confusing? Absolutely! How could this be happening to someone who used to dress her dog up in doll clothes and push her around in a baby stroller?!?

Another plan that went haywire was our desire to continue traveling to and working in then-Communist Romania once we moved from there to Austria when our student visas expired. It only made sense to us — since we had learned the language and had so many wonderful relationships there — that God would want us to keep building upon that foundation. And yet on our very first train trip there after moving we were both ushered off the train when crossing the Hungarian/Romanian border… and my husband was not allowed to reenter Romania for six years.

Disappointing? Yes! Confusing? Totally! Wasn’t this a waste of all those hours of language learning?!?

More halted, re-directed, discarded-altogether plans have occurred in subsequent years, and yet some valuable lessons have also surfaced.

For I know the plans I have for you, declared the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Jeremiah 29:11

All my life’s whys and whens and wheres and wherefores are in God’s hands.

Psalm 31:15 as translated by Dan Crawford into Lubu, a Bantu language

The more I get to know God as a loving Father — MY Father — the more I’m able to rest in knowing that HE is in charge. That HE knows what He’s doing.

And so disappointments, as they continue to come, are things I endeavor to see through the lens of a loving Father who ultimately knows what’s best. Notice I said, “endeavor to see.” Some days I do that better than others… I’m still learning, still growing.

As to the saying “God’s ‘no’ is actually a ‘I have something better in mind’ “… that proved true for us in both the above examples. In God’s timing He provided two incredible children for us through adoption. And He used the no-longer-able-to-enter- Romania scenario to redirect our path to what we’re continuing to do today.

But, in all honesty, there are those times when God’s ‘no’ feels more like He doesn’t have something better in mind. And so when there seems to be no reason, no advantage, God’s ‘no’ ends up being a response we just have to sit with. Accept. And trust that the finality of His answer will ultimately be for our good. Other times ‘no’ means ‘wait.’ Both types of ‘no’ are hard. Both are opportunities for us to realign our perspective with God’s.

When I wrote to the participants and the team that would be leading the training sessions I shared with them that…

God’s plan and ours for this fall’s training ended up being different. We’re confident, however, that HE knows what He’s doing — and so we rest and trust in that … and pray that God will use this experience to help each of us see Him in fresh ways.

When plans go awry, may we encourage one another to see those disappointments from a different perspective — from God’s point of view. And together, we’ll be able to have joy in the journey of this thing called “Life!”